I have read many tales and many histories which turn upon the abuse of _lettres de cachet_ in the famous ante-Revolutionary days. Will anybody tell me the difference? It seems to me that all that could be done by their means can be done 'under certificates' here and now, and legally justified afterwards over and over again. The Bastille itself could scarcely hold its prisoners more closely than the 'establishment' wherein I lived; and scarcely harder could it have been for any echo of complaint or suffering to reach the outer world. Buried and forgotten we lay there, like dead men out of mind. Of the farcical visits of inspection made by her Majesty's Commissioners I shall have something presently to say. Their manner of discharging their solemn duty is, to my mind, in the whole round of wrong the worst feature of all. Whilst I was being thus spirited away through the heart of London, with scores of warm-hearted friends within unconscious hail who would have raised a riot to save me if they had known anything of the truth, I knew as little of the fate before me as the inconvenient kinsman on his road to the old Bastille. Had I known, weak as I was, I should have resisted; and with what result? What is the result to those who do righteously resist? For there must be some who do. On my second apprehension, which I shall describe in its place, I should have known. But I was drugged by authority, as effectually and deliberately as ever was heroine of a novel, and brought back to my prison from the North of England under the influence of opium. More of this in time. Let me return to my first journey. There were my warders winking and blinking; my private domestic pouring into the ears of the other, who listened with the indifference of a man accustomed to the ways of nameless beings like me, his own version of my private history, and making grabs at me in the dark when we came to a tunnel, to create a prejudice in my favour. I remember dimly wondering what it was about, expecting the men to handcuff me, vaguely dreaming of the charms of bed and of a 'home,' speculating somewhat why I had none. Of that journey I remember little more, except eating savoury jelly at Waterloo Station--so oddly do trifles impress one in the most critical moments of life. The next turn of the kaleidoscope pictures me seated in an armchair, just before the episode of the pudding-eater, I suppose, interviewed by the ancient head of the asylum, who, having me there under certificate from my family, had no opinion to pronounce on my mental condition, but simply to accept me as a madman, worth a round sum a year to him, and be thankful. But for a certain episode which I shall in due course relate, I might not have found the man out. He was quite stupid, and had so muddled his venerable brain with the contemplation--I will not say the study--of insanity, that, after five minutes' conversation, any two apothecaries from anywhere would have 'certificated' him at once. He